We had arrived in Bahrein on the evening of the Thursday, and spent the Friday, Saturday and Sunday there, leaving on the Monday morning. There were indeed things we had to do or get done – the servicing, the laundry, the sorting out of surplus kit, and the slower less perceptible business of recovering from lack of sleep.
Between all this past and present activity was attention to the future. We were trying to get the Iranians to let us land at the Bandaras Abbas, just across the Gulf of Hormuz; or even simply use their airspace on the way to Pakistan. Mike Gray, James and Martin all applied to them. The three of them used email, fax and phone. They all pestered different levels of the government hierarchy. They responded to requests for faxes with promises of faxing back a response in ten minutes. Nothing ever happened.
“Do these people live in fear of saying yes?” Martin whispered to himself at one point after a particularly circuitous phone call to an official in the Iranian civil aviation authority. The reality may have been that the southern coastal strip of Iran is to some extent in rebel hands, and they did not want to admit it. Or perhaps they thought that people using US Navy facilities must really be agents of the CIA.
We decided to go for an alternative. We had been keen to use Iran only because it kept sea crossings to a minimum. The Gulf of Hormuz crossing is not much more than 50 miles from the northern tip of Oman whether you fly north or on any course through to east.
However, with so many incident-free miles behind us, we were now developing more trust in the machine that had brought us all this way.
“Why bother with Iran, if they don’t want us?” I suggested. “Why don’t we fly due east over the bay from here to UAE, and then along the Iranian coast all the way to Pakistan?”
Having measured out the route, we decided to take off for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, with the idea of reassessing the situation when we got there.
Our final task at Bahrein was to express our thanks for the facilities and help we’d been given by the Americans. We went round saying so to every American we could find. In return they gave us some ration packs and some water, and wished us the best of luck. I got the feeling they reckoned they’d be answering a distress call from us within a few hours.
Undeterred by their local experience, we got clearance to take off, and then, ignominiously, the helicopter would not start. The starter electrics were dead, and there was no response when I turned the key. I tried pushing a few buttons and switches, and reflected edgily that we had just put our engineer on the plane home.
“So much for trusting you all the way to Pakistan,” I said to Uniform Kilo under my breath, feeling immediately ridiculous for talking to a helicopter.
Getting a grip on myself, I checked all the circuit breakers in case they had glazed over in the coastal humidity. Electrics should not be stubborn, but sometimes they are. I carefully pushed and pulled at each of the circuit breakers, and tried the starter again. Inexplicably, it worked, and the engine ran beautifully. Unsettling, but there was nothing we could do to ensure that it did not happen again, and over the water we would just have to hope that things would keep going. If there was a continuing problem it was most likely confined to the starter, and over the ocean we would not be needing that. Anyway, we were off. Taxi way B. Course for Dubai, 095 degrees.
To Dubai from Bahrein is a sea crossing of around 250 miles. We flew over oil installations, oil slicks, tankers, smells of petroleum, and banks of steam coming off the sea. But there were also schools of porpoises, and fleets of turtle doing breast stroke with four arms, in all the pollution. The engine behaved faultlessly, and we began to relax.
As we approached the city, high above the coastal clouds, a trick of refraction of sunlight on the pollution seemed to lift the dazzling silver skyscrapers from their desert foundations, and place them, floating, on the evening clouds 2000 feet above us.
In the air over Dubai we descended enough to be in the mobile phone coverage so we could text James back home to tell him that, having still heard nothing, we were abandoning the idea of landing in Iran, and instead were planning to overfly Dubai, and aiming to land at Fujairah on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates.
Dubai passed us through its airspace. Fujairah, 80 miles on, beckoned us in. I climbed up over the clouds covering the intervening mountain range, with the peaks showing through, and descended again into the clear air above Fujairah; and down to land.
